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Silk Road 2.0 Launches

forbes.com

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Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#121

Post by tslathrow »

corin_ wrote: post #30
andrewljohnson wrote: post #3

I'd never buy heroin from a website, but I see the Silk Road as cyber-civil-disobedience, and I hope the persona of DPR and the site itself are as unsinkable as they claim. The drug war is a ghastly thing, and the number of people we lock up in the US is more shameful than our foreign policy. You can begrudge the first DPR his lame security, shady murder contracts, and ill-gotten fortune, but he's the product of our…

Are you saying heroin specifically because you do buy it but not from websites, or because some drugs you'd trust to a website (regardless of whether you personally buy them or not) but heroin not, or were you just naming a random drug?

I will never understand why Silk Road is easier than just hitting up your dealer

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#122

Post by mkramlich »

The interesting thing to me is that, in theory, the same kinds of extreme privacy-protecting, anonymity-maximizing measures which can be used to host any kind of Silk Road, or to visit it and use it, can ALSO be used by... wait for it... wait for it... yes the law enforcement folks. In other words, how can you be sure that this new Silk Road 2.0 is not a sting honey pot setup by the FBI itself?

I don't buy stuff like that and never will. But if I did, I wouldn't go near anything using the Silk Road name after a seizure/arrest has been publicly documented.

Remember, on the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog. Or a teenager living in your mom's basement in Russia. Or an FBI agent munching on donuts in Washington DC. Etc.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#123

Post by nerfhammer »

gwern wrote: post #112
scott_karana wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you ever buy anything at grocery store, drug store, restaurant that you put in your body? Not really a fair comparison. If a grocery store assaults or defrauds you, you have legal recourse. There is nothing you can do if an illicit transaction fails. The rest of what you say is true, of course.

You can leave bad feedback, and take it to the dispute center to force the seller to defend themselves to the SR admins. This is more recourse than you have in practice against a grocery store if they refuse to give you a refund - what are you going to do, sue them?

If a grocery store harms you in an illegal way you they can be punished by the force of the state in a variety of ways. The same is not true of a anonymous person on an inbound tor site.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#124

Post by mkramlich »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #3

I'd never buy heroin from a website, but I see the Silk Road as cyber-civil-disobedience, and I hope the persona of DPR and the site itself are as unsinkable as they claim. The drug war is a ghastly thing, and the number of people we lock up in the US is more shameful than our foreign policy. You can begrudge the first DPR his lame security, shady murder contracts, and ill-gotten fortune, but he's the product of our…

I didn't produce him, or it. Thus I feel no shame.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#125

Post by schenecstasy »

stcredzero wrote: post #69
subpixel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the Silk Roads of the world making much difference with regard to the drug war. Right now Silk Road is the eBay of drugs, where convenience is it's competitive advantage. I can get some drug without visiting a shady person in some shady place, but the drugs (in general) are still coming to the US the bloody, violent way via paramilitaries, druglords, etc. A huge part of the US war on drugs takes place amo…

> I'd be more excited about an Etsy of drugs I think you mean more of an Amazon Marketplace of drugs. > the drugs (in general) are still coming to the US the bloody, violent way via paramilitaries, druglords, etc. If the information and payment infrastructure is good enough, it should make producers and shippers invisible to other producers and shippers, including the paramilitaries and drug-lords.

I'm looking for an Etsy for drugs. I want my synthetic opiates cradled in a lace & cordoroy kerchief that states "rustic charm".

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#126

Post by OvidNaso »

jbackus wrote: post #84
subpixel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the Silk Roads of the world making much difference with regard to the drug war. Right now Silk Road is the eBay of drugs, where convenience is it's competitive advantage. I can get some drug without visiting a shady person in some shady place, but the drugs (in general) are still coming to the US the bloody, violent way via paramilitaries, druglords, etc. A huge part of the US war on drugs takes place amo…

You can use digital black markets like the silk road as an analogue for legalization though. Forget how the vendors obtain the drugs for a second and just analyze the differences in distribution and consumption between offline and online drug trade. Offline there is: - competition via violence - political narcoterrorism - profit maximization by product dilution - profit maximization by product deception (most street…

Violence amongst end user drug dealers is very rare and confined to specific, very poor, areas. Wholesale is the only place where you start to see significant amounts of cash, and hence most of the problems, and that has zero differences between offline and on. There is no 'political narcoterrorism' between the guys selling 8ths of coke in the neighborhood. You're also mischaracterizing the drug trade with regards to consumer habits. Drug users communicate about dealers and products the same way people communicate about every other local business. The internet has greatly expanded and enhanced this ability, but prior to the Internet, local businesses, just like local drug dealers, operated by word of mouth and competed in many facets of service. We know this as drug quality has gone up and up over the years.

Remember, the vast majority of offline drug deals do not consist of driving to the hood to pick up something from a gangster. I think this mis-perception clouds a lot of the analysis of operations like the Silk Road.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#127

Post by OvidNaso »

jbackus wrote: post #98
philfreo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> violence impossible in anonymous marketplace if you read the report about the 1st silk road, you'll see that's not true

Alright. Let's assume the massive difference in quantity of violence is substantial. We're talking 10s of thousands dead via cartel trade vs. 2 alleged attempted hits on the silk road. Even then that was the operator of the marketplace defending users, it wasn't a vendor killing another vendor to gain a competitive advantage.

But your analysis specifically excluded the source of all of this violence, the wholesale procurement of the drugs by the end user dealers. None of that is different with the Silk Road.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#128

Post by yeukhon »

I am serious here too: I don't support the website's initiative. I endorse the technical aspect of it as a way to test whether the design is optimal and achievable, but in no way would I ever support drug dealers.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#129

Post by fleitz »

jarrett wrote: post #120
nickles wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what made Kaczynski (the Unabomber) so difficult to track. IIRC, he would travel for a few hours (by bus) to a town and deposit his packages in a mailbox there [citation needed]. This made it difficult to track him, since the origin of the package didn't leak any information about the sender. For sellers, proper OPSec requires that they do not leave fingerprints in/on the package, that mailing locations are r…

Even then, there are still possible information leaks. For example, conceivably when you package the drugs in your warehouse, local pollens and molds could find their way into the insides of the packaging. If the distribution of pollens and molds is unique to a reasonably small area, that would be an information leak. A bit sci-fi? Sort of. You'd need a database of mold and pollen distributions for the whole country,…

DEA effort is generally a faster than the slowest person type problem, you don't need to be better than the DEA, just better than someone else.

Agents need to make busts in order to get promoted, therefore 'rational' agents will catch those easier to catch before devoting resources to harder to catch suspects.

Re: Silk Road 2.0 Launches

#130

Post by draugadrotten »

davmre wrote: post #39
ihsw wrote: post #6

I have a sneaking suspicion that it's a honeypot. Just a hunch.

The Silk Road seizure demonstrated that the only reasonable way to participate in any online drug market is to assume the market itself is compromised and untrustworthy. That means you never upload identifying information in cleartext (e.g., buyers encrypt their addresses with the seller's public key), and you run all bitcoins sent to or received from such a site through a third-party mixer. Of course, there still ha…

> It was partially addressed by the feedback/review system -- which does involve a certain amount of trust in the site not to fabricate reviews

Many users over in Europe took to themselves to review sellers on trusted third-party sites, such as flashback.org. There trusted sellers were "greened", as it were, and word was quickly spread when some seller tried a bait-and-switch by giving good drugs to the first buyers and scamming the second wave.

Full Disclosure: I am a user of flashback.org but I never used drugs or silk road.

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